>First, it seems that the license switch to AGPL (i.e. a "viral" license) >was made very silent.
I disagree. On the mailing list, while it wasn't trumpets and marching bands, It Was Discussed. At some length IIRC. But that's my perspective on the change. Yours (just grab the jar from time to time), is clearly different. It looks like we need to iron that out. Efforts were made to make this change more prominent, though those efforts may have fallen short (license.txt? whoops). In particular, the move from "com.lowagie" to "com.itextpdf" coincided with the license change, as did a jump in version number (from 2.x to 5.x). Folks were forced to change their source. The idea was to get folks to realize what they were getting into. > Second, I had tried to contact the iText developers in the past about > adding some functionality to iText and requested an offer. My > experience was really disappointing. Although I emailed with some > persons several times I never really got a quote. In general, it seems (as somone who has done a small project or two under/for/through it) that iTextSoftware is more about contracting features to be built *for* third parties, rather than contracting features to be built *by* third parties. Ya got it backwards. ;) > There is also no indication on the website about the price of the > "commercial" license. With this license change, iText is > putting itself in direct competition with e.g. PDFlib (=> www.pdflib.com), > which can be had transparently for about $1,100 (server license) and has lots > of > additional features. Not quite, but there's a definite parallel there. I will take issue with the word "transparently" however. While the price is transparent, PDFLib (from what I can tell from poking around their web site just now) is a closed source app (or set of apps). I just noticed PDFlib Lite, but that sounds like a "first hit is free" kind of deal that happens to come with source (which may be a direct reaction to iText's popularity). If one were to compare the price of "all the stuff PDFLib can do that iText can do" and "iText on a server" (whatever that might be? I dunno) you'd get a better idea of what's going on. For example, while iText cannot "Linearize" a PDF, it's quite capable of signing and password open/add/remove operations. A server license of PDFLib PLOP + DS runs another $1000. pCOS, (which sounds like a basic "cos" layer, though I haven't done any digging) is another $245. At any rate, things aren't as bad as you seem to think they are. !perfect, but what is? --Mark Storer Senior Software Engineer Cardiff.com #include <disclaimer> typedef std::Disclaimer<Cardiff> DisCard; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
